Re: large initramfs causes h/w reset after decompressing

From: John Z. Bohach
Date: Thu Jul 14 2011 - 18:39:26 EST


On Thursday 14 July 2011 02:14:08 pm H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 07/14/2011 09:06 AM, John Z. Bohach wrote:
> > I have a large initramfs cpio file, about 890 MB, which expands to
> > 2.7 GB, and am running on linux-2.6.36.1, in 64-bit mode with 8 GB
> > of physical RAM.
> >
> > Upon loading the initramfs, I see the message "Decompressing..."
> > for a few seconds, and then comes a reset.
> >
> > This question has come up before...is there some sort of max size.
> > that I am exceeding? With 8 GB of physical memory and 64-bit arch.
> > (AMD-II), certainly seems that there should be enough memory, no?
> >
> > Thanks...
>
> What bootloader are you using? There are some bootloaders which
> don't allocate the initramfs in a very good spot.
>
> -hpa

I've actually gotten the improbable to work, and am PXE booting via
syslinux and dhcp.

It all works fine with an initramfs of ~20 MB, but that's quite a diff.
from 2.7 GB of expanded /root (890 MB cpio.tar.gz file).

But excuse my ignorance, I don't see the relevance of your
question...the initramfs is part of the kernel itself...I simply load
the kernel bzImage (all 890 MB) and that's where its all at...this is
_not_ an initrd.

--john
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